...a companion blog to "Math-Frolic," specifically for interviews, book reviews, weekly-linkfests, and longer posts or commentary than usually found at the Math-Frolic site.

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"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." ---Bertrand Russell (1907) Rob Gluck

"I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it [mathematics] consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-legged animal is an animal." ---Bertrand Russell (1957)

******************************************************************** Rob Gluck

Friday, May 18, 2018

Friday Potpourri


Maybe this week’s viral Laurel/Yanny episode can finally help explain how it is that some people listening to a certain Donald hear a purported President speak, while others more correctly hear a venal Demagogue blathering. 
...In any event, a new Friday potpourri:

1)  Michael Harris, interesting as always, on the uses and responsibilities of mathematics:

2)  The 157th “Carnival of Mathematics” here:

3)  Again, a hint of linkage between prime number patterns and physics (via Natalie Wolchover and Quanta):

4)  More physics than math, but I’ll still include it here… The winning essay in FQXi’s latest essay contest asking “”What Is fundamental?”:

All the runner-up essays HERE.

5)  Patrick Honner reflects on the story of his journey in mathematics for Story Collider:

6)  Jim Propp’s latest, for geometry and Madeleine L’Engle fans, on “Time and Tesseracts”:
https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2018/05/16/time-and-tesseracts/

7)  Walt Hickey is leaving FiveThirtyEight to begin his own daily newsletter, “Numlock,” highlighting "the context and importance of the numbers you read about in the news”:


…Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest): 

1)  Hey Arachnophobes… don’t kill spiders:

2)  Will just close out the week, as seems appropriate, by rising up off my Laurels to post a favorite old Yanni tune:





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